The north shore of Port Townsend is a black silhouette against a purple, predawn sky as Jack Scherting steers his 18-footer across the dark surface of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
Scherting’s vessel is pure fishing boat – a basic fiberglass shell with inboard engine and electronics beneath a tattered canopy. The retired professor steers with one hand while the other fiddles with his GPS navigation, which is not cooperating.
“Nothing,” he mutters. “Looks like we’ll be finding the fish by dead reckoning.”
Squinting in the dim light, he studies his landmarks from Protection Island to Whidbey. He slows to a stop, cuts the engine and reaches for his halibut gear.
And so resumes the hundred-year quest for the giant, Northwest, cross-eyed flatfish.
Most of us know halibut from what we see at the local market – a firm, pearly white filet best cooked with a light dill sauce.
For sports fishermen, halibut is that and more – a true trophy fish, prized for its raw combative spirit on the hook. Witness the 135-pound slab Scherting hooked in the strait last year.
For commercial fishermen, it’s money in the bank – if they’re allowed to catch it. Just one big “barn door” halibut will bring hundreds of dollars. Local fishermen with coveted Alaska halibut quotas began cruising north earlier this spring, leaving the less fortunate muttering at docks.
Believed to be the world’s largest flounder, occasionally exceeding 300 pounds, Pacific halibut has been fished to the brink of extinction at least three times over the past century. And it’s no easy task trying to keep it from happening again.
All this swirls around a downright homely bottom-dweller whose front end is a crazy configuration of crooked eyes and crooked mouth.
Each winter, halibut hatch by the millions in deep, offshore waters, then drift in the open sea while they feed on plankton. During the first few weeks, it’s a seemingly normal fish.
But then something strange happens. The inch-long fish rolls 90 degrees onto its left side and begins swimming sideways on the ocean’s bottom. The underside turns white and the upper side darkens to a camouflage green and brown. Meanwhile, the left eye begins to migrate across the fish’s snout to the upper side, where it resettles next to the right eye. The result is an oddly asymmetric muppet-like fish with two bulging eyes next to a sideways mouth.
So configured, the halibut lives the rest of its long life – as much as 50 years – on the bottom, spawning during the winter in deep water (800 to 1,500 feet), moving to relatively shallow water to feed in the spring and summer.
That’s where fishermen like Scherting find them.
He rigs our heavy poles with high-test line, a 20-ounce weight and a pair of hooks baited with frozen herring. We flip the gear into the water, letting out line until we feel the weights hit bottom, then reel back a few feet – and wait.
The GPS finally displays our navigational fix. “We’re about 50 feet from where we wanted to be,” Scherting chuckles.
People have fished halibut here for well over a century. Native Americans snagged them, probably in shallower waters, with bone hooks attached to line woven from cedar bark. The modern fishery dates to 1888, when fishermen caught halibut near Tacoma and shipped them to Boston on the newly complete railroad.
Even here in Salmon Country, halibut was good fishing. They could be caught almost year-round, and fishermen soon learned that the harvest, if well-iced, could be shipped cross-country without spoiling.
Initially, it was fished from rowboats and delivered to steamships. Over time, the fishery became dominated by Norwegian immigrants, who built stout, seagoing “schooners” capable of working through heavy weather. (One of the last of those handsome halibut schooners sits today on blocks at the boat haven, with a “for sale” sign.)
Instead of dropping individual hooks, they began using highly efficient “longline” gear – hundreds of feet of cable, anchored at one end, with baited hooks spaced every few feet. This gear is lowered to the ocean bottom, left for a few hours, then hauled back aboard, hopefully with a boatload of fresh halibut.
So equipped, the fleet promptly fished out Puget Sound. They moved north into the strait and toward the open sea, finding new halibut grounds and quickly picking them virtually clean.
By the 1910s, it was clear that something had to be done. Eventually, the United States and Canada signed a treaty, which led to the International Pacific Halibut Commission, which still manages the North Pacific stocks today.
That worked for a while. But over the years, halibut has become something of a morality lesson, a case study in how – or how not – to manage our oceans.
Commercial fishing is hard work and not usually lucrative. But there is romance to the business, a frontier “buffalo hunter” mentality that attracts men and women who don’t care to work in offices with bosses and florescent lights.
Scherting is no commercial fisherman, but he has what he calls “that fisherman gene.” For 30-plus years, he taught college classes. But at every opportunity, he’d find his way back to Puget Sound or Alaska to continue his pursuit of the Pacific halibut. More recently, he served on a state advisory committee that tried to make sense of it all.
“Fisheries management is about managing people, not fish,” he says. “If we do that, the fish will take care of themselves.”
Easier said than done. Over the years, more and more people were drawn into the romance and increasing profits. So government groped for ways to prevent overfishing. It tried limiting the gear or the size of the boats. But fishermen are innovative; they’ll always find a way.
Jim Norris, Port Townsend fisherman-turned-scientist, was one of the many who set out in the early 1970s to learn the fishery. Fishing alone, he hauled in a 140-pounder near Neah Bay, and Norris was hooked.
“It was hard work, but it was also fun,” Norris recalls. “Catching them is one thing; the trick is finding them.”
Hundreds more joined the fishery, increasing pressure on the stocks – even in Alaska, where halibut had been plentiful. To ease the pressure, managers shortened the season – from six months to three, then to one month, then to a few weeks. By the mid-’90s, halibut seasons had been reduced to one day a year. Thousands of fishermen would spend days rigging their boats, baiting their hooks, loading up with ice. Then, at the appointed hour, they would race out to the halibut banks and drop their longline gear.
The result was chaos. Fishermen had no choice but to work in good weather or bad. One boat’s gear would tangle with another, and huge amounts were lost on the bottom. The fish that was caught was rushed back to the docks, overwhelming the processing plants. Fish quality declined and prices dropped. Worse still, fishermen were killed or injured in the chaos.
For years, the federal government debated what to do about the “derby.” Ultimately, despite fierce opposition, Alaska’s halibut was divided into shares and distributed to fishermen based on their fishing history. Successful fishermen got bigger shares of the resource, while others got little or nothing. Since those shares are transferable, they became enormously valuable on the open market.
“It was painful for a lot of people,” says Norris, who was one of the beneficiaries. “But it worked. Halibut is very well-managed.”
Ten years later, halibut is still a sore subject down at the boat haven. But something worked; those who own quota can now fish it whenever they choose – when the weather is right and the price is high. There is a steady supply of fresh halibut to the marketplace. And nobody is dying in the process.
Jack Scherting and I caught nothing that day on the halibut hump; I can write about fishing, but the fish have never taken me very seriously. The next day, Jack was back out there, hooked a whopper, and stopped by to deliver a 5-pound filet in a ziplock bag. Some guys shouldn’t be taught to fish; it’s better just to give them one.
(To contact Ross Anderson with a story idea or comment, e-mail to news@ptleader.com, subject line: On the Waterfront.)
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